Ingo Rohlfing
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ingorohlfing.bsky.social
Ingo Rohlfing
@ingorohlfing.bsky.social

I am here for all interesting and funny posts on the social sciences, broadly understood and including open science and meta science, academia, teaching and research. https://linktr.ee/ingorohlfing

Political science 30%
Sociology 17%

ggskewboxplots: Enhanced Boxplots for Skewed Data in #Rstats
arxiv.org/abs/2511.170... #dataviz Never thought about it, but asymmetric whiskers are plausible to me when the distribution is skewed. Plus I didn't know there are so many variants of boxplots (shouldn't be surprised, though)
METRICS is accepting applications for the 2026–27 postdoctoral fellowship in meta-research at Stanford. Deadline: Feb 15, 2026. Start date will be around Oct 1, 2026 (+/- 2 month flexibility). See: metrics.stanford.edu/postdoctoral... #MetaResearch #postdoc
Postdoctoral Fellowship Announcement 2026-27
metrics.stanford.edu
NEW from me - NSF cancels grant scheme for social science research.

Seems the NSF quietly archived ALL calls for DDRIG grants in the SBE directorate. This is a massive blow for PhD students wanting to do cutting-edge social science research. 🏺🧪
Today's biggest science news: Doomed comet explodes | Comet 3I/ATLAS course alteration | Dark matter detected?
Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2025: Your daily feed of the biggest discoveries and breakthroughs making headlines.
www.livescience.com

(or a) main argument is: One can use LLMs for coding, which is a key qualitative element of the research process. One cannot fully replace a researcher (I agree), however, bc drawing conclusions is a qualitative exercise. If qual coding can be delegated to an LLM, why not also other qual parts? 2/

Qualitative research with LLM chatbots: Technological reflexivity for interpretative technology
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
I haven't tried it yet, but I think LLMs can be useful for some tasks for some kind of qualitative research. wrt the article, I am not sure how consistent the 1/

Reposted by Ingo Rohlfing

For some research studies the optimal sample size should be estimated at 0
🚨 LSE Assistant Professor in Political Science 🚨

We’re hiring a tenure-track assistant professor - any area of empirical political science - to join our wonderful Government Dept @lsegovernment.bsky.social

Any questions, please reach out to me

📣 Please share! 📣

jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...
A new article by Chloe Patton in #ResearchEvaluation shows how debates about #OpenScience often slip into absurdity – like demanding #replication from the #Humanities. You can’t replicate history, culture, or interpretation the way you replicate a physics experiment: doi.org/10.1093/rese...
lads i found ANOTHER Table of Impossible Summary Statistics in a "green economics" paper 🚩

Can you see the problem?

I read this post yesterday again because I was reading on many websites about CIs as covering the population value with 95% (or so) probability. I started to doubt my understanding of CIs and needed reassurance.

Reposted by Ingo Rohlfing

"If we are unable to educate clinicians then merely persuading them to use CI's rather than p-values is to replace
the unthinking use of one technique with that of another."

A.P.Grieve (1992) Royal Statistical Society News and Notes, 18(7), 3-4.

Same here. (Incidentally, we cover confidence intervals tomorrow in Stats 101.) However, when one says "Only use confidence intervals" (not you, but others), you are mandating a certain research interest, which is what one may or may not have in a given study.

Reposted by Ingo Rohlfing

#dataviz Very cool interactive - 7 sets Venn Diagram
128 color combinations from mixing 7 colors

moebio.com/research/sev...
7 sets Venn Diagram
moebio.com
Luckily, you don't need to choose b/c you can use them both! The framing of "p value bad"/"CI good" means that some people never really get that they're based on the same information & the same basic stat. philosophy (some of these points are made here: richarddmorey.medium.com/power-and-pr...)
Power and precision
Why the push for replacing “power” with “precision” is misguided
richarddmorey.medium.com

Reposted by Ingo Rohlfing

💫 Beginner-friendly #qualitative courses this Feb ⤵️

🔹Applications of Focus Groups @karenlumsden.bsky.social
🔹Case Study Research: Method & Practice @ingorohlfing.bsky.social
🔹Intro to Qualitative Comparative Analysis

📆 16–27 Feb 2026, Online

🐦 Early Bird until 5 Jan buff.ly/qoXc0pJ
#ecprms

At least it's different, but valid point. p-values can be useful in some contexts and for some questions, confidence intervals for others. I never got why CIs should be superior to p-values per se. I would have to read ab New Statistics again, but I can't imagine a convincing reason.
"academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it... The dominant four collectively generated... $12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024."
Next: Geoff Cumming @thenewstats.bsky.social with 'Statistical significance and p values: The researcher’s heroin'
* p values are highly unrealiable - don't trust them, don't use them!
www.thenewstatistics.com
tiny.cc/osfsigroulette
#IRICSydney

Nature's 5 best science book picks are behind a paywall. www.nature.com/articles/d41... You can see the first three books completely, the fourth book has the review capped, the fifth is completely hidden. I am sure one can do a nice quasi-experimental study with this.

I am sure they spent a lot of time thinking about what should and shouldn't be included in the interface. As they write, it reflects their experience with teaching quantitative methods, so I am sure it meets their needs.

actual data, probably messy, to answer real-world questions.
The tabs seem a bit overloaded to me with input elements, data, formulas and plots, but this is just my personal impression.
Here is the direct link to the website: 2k1.iq.harvard.edu 2/

Reposted by Sebastian Karcher

Statistical Intuition without Coding (or Teachers) [and w/o LLMs]
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
I think this is a very useful approach when one does not want to teach coding in parallel. Simulating data and quantities of interest are insightful features, though at the expense of not using 1/
Risk of bias in robustness reports: https://osf.io/wj26e

Okay, quote tweets do not work when replies are restricted too (makes sense).
I was referring to a post where someone wrote he "heard numbers" that a larger share of papers is never read and an even larger share never cited. There was no source. One should just not dish out such number w/o sources.
As replies are restricted, a quote-post it has to be: What are the sources for these numbers? For political science, we have ongoing work in progress showing it is less than 50% of papers (for about 100 journals). Still high, but not that high.

I am not sure either whether this is for real, a scam or something else. The listed organizers are actual people, at least, and they refer to this agents4science.stanford.edu as their role model, which looks legit, but who can tell these days?

this, but this is necessarily still in its infancy. If one combines three new uses of AI in one format, how do you which one works better or worse and under what conditions? If an LLM tells you an LLM-written paper on LLM-based qualitative research is great, would you buy this w/o human scrutiny? 3/

The use of LLMs for qualitative research is new in itself and worth exploring. Determining the value of AI for this purpose requires human evaluation, IMO. Delegating paper writing to an LLM and the review of papers is also a new element of science, worth exploring too, I guess. There is work on 2/